See, it's actually interesting that this guy wasn't in NAFO.

A lot of the people I follow and who follow me are NAFO fellas, so as a result, I have social graph connections to most people involved in Ukraine war activism.

But my only three mutuals with that guy were three journalists who followed him after he attempted to assassinate Trump.

Remember, we have open membership, all you need to do is donate to Ukraine. I've been cautioning people for a minute about this, just assume that NAFO is already infiltrated; it won't do them much good the way it's structured anyway.

This guy even replied to Karen Dotcom and Black in the Empire, like a lot of NAFO fellas did. Yet no social graph connections.

I chalk up the oddness of it all to, Routh simply sucked at social media - I mean, did you see his tweets - but it's interesting that he sucked so bad, spammed so much, and never seems to have come across NAFO
Here he is talking back to Karen Dotcom and Russian in the Black Empire or whatever

And still, no mutuals with that guy

We don't have enough data to construct an account of the Trump assassination attempt.

But, I think we have enough to shoot some of the wilder, stupider theories.

What I have is:

- social media profiles (before they were deleted, I have video recordings I'm using for screenshots)

- interview in New York Times in '23 ()

- thread talking about him as a frankly grifty, unstable-sounding "recruiter" with a cockamamie plan to get Afghan troops into Ukraine (, also get a lawyer, please)

- a fairly good picture of his gear including a medium/high confidence assessment of weapon platform ()

From this let's test out a few of the theories:nytimes.com/2023/03/25/wor…

https://x.com/v8mile/status/1804097069876916506

https://x.com/FluteMagician/status/1835448309105746117

It's almost trivially easy to rebut some of the conspiracy theories, actually, even at our current imperfect state of knowledge mere hours out- remember, we haven't heard from the guy yet, and he was taken into custody alive. But some of the facts, as currently known, give the lie to such theories.

Conspiracy theory 1: Professional sniper
Almost totally disproven by choice of weapon platform. Assume a 9-inch vital zone (head, or solar plexus/midsection). With a (generously) 2.5 MOA AK-platform Saiga or SKS with a "sporterized" stock chambered in 7.62, you're looking at 10 inch CEP at 400 yards and nearly 50 MOA of drop.

The inaccuracy is bad enough: you could be aimed dead center at the vital zone, mathematically perfectly, and the sheer inaccuracy of the rifle would make you miss.

The equipment makes it more implausible. Assuming he's using, say, a 3-9x scope (say, a Leupold VX-6 popular with the low-budget crowd). That scope has only 60 MOA of adjustment (30 up, 30 down). Really nice scopes have 50 MOA up, 50 MOA down or so, I doubt he has one of those.

So, unless he has a 30 MOA canted scope mount, he wouldn't even be able to dial in his elevation because, realistically, people aren't shooting 7.62 x 39 out to 400 yards, they use 7.62 x 54R rifles (e.g., SVD Dragunov.

You hit a 9-inch plate at 400m with an AK-platform weapon in 7.62 x 39 at the range, people will probably buy you a beer. It's not easy.

MAGAs hate 'Murder in Mississippi' (1965) by Norman Rockwell because they want to believe the lie in everything that Rockwell painted before.

It is difficult to see the beauty in it, as with all of Rockwell's post-propaganda period. It's easier to believe in the America of Rockwell's 1950s work, an America with clean people living lives of plenty, a kind of aesthetic cowardice that manifests in revisionist history for MAGA trash aesthetics ("trashthetics" if you prefer, which I don't).

The ugly truth behind the comforting pictures of white people who look like you is the same thing erased by the "Great Again" in MAGA, the same as it was during Lindbergh's racist "America First" campaign. It's based on systematic erasure of anything that interferes with a conveniently white, great American past.

The ugly truth is this, one of Rockwell's starkest images, painted in the period emerging after his awakening during the Civil Rights struggle.

Dennis Rafferty at describes the context as follows:

"The victims had been college students volunteering during a summer campaign in Mississippi to encourage black residents to register to vote. At that time, less than 10 percent of eligible blacks in Mississippi were registered, and now with the signing into law of the Civil Rights Act, striking down long-standing state “Jim Crow” laws prohibiting African Americans from voting, black voters for the first time had federal laws protecting these rights, which superseded and nullified previous state voting laws.

No longer having any legal means to prevent blacks from voting, local white racists now turned to an organized program of terror and intimidation to discourage African Americans exercising their new voting rights. To achieve these ends, the local sheriff’s office was clandestinely working closely with the Ku Klux Klan, who burnt the church hosting the summer voting rights campaign to the ground, an act intended to terrorize the liberal student activists that had descended on the town (a local newspaper described it as an “invasion” of unwelcome outsiders)."

Rockwell is in full mastery of his painterly powers, sharpened by advertising technique as well as a dialogue with a past unvarnished by masturbatory white supremacist myths. This is clearest in his similarities to Francisco Goya y Lucientes.

1/4livingchurch.org In The Third of May 1808, Goya solves similar problems to Rockwell's pencil sketches towards the full-sized version of this image.

The political similarities are fascinating; in Goya's case, his painting illustrates Spanish resistance to Napoleonic invasion.

Rather than making something intricate and detailed for a private patron, Goya makes something impactful, stark, even drastically simplified. The moment of the men in a Spanish village being collectively punished by the French for the actions of a sniper is reduced to a single flash, even a single color.

As with readings of Rockwell's Civil Rights work, it's easy for your average trashy fascist to dismiss it as victim-celebration, even celebrate the horrors it shows as if to intimidate the broader public in a show of collective sadism; and the answers are to that, I submit, are the same for us today as they were for mid-20th-century antifascist artists and theorists.

Search 'Norman Rockwell' today, you get mostly picturesque, clean, agreeable white Americans living clean, agreeable lives, 2.5 kids and a house with a white picket fence.

And then this: 'The Problem We All Live With', from 1964.

At first you don't see the beauty.
(🧵) Most of Rockwell's work is almost if not outright propagandistic.

I'd argue there's actually elements of fascism in there, like references to an always-receding glorious past and racial monotony so severe it looks like a satire today.

That changes in the early '60s.

Thread of actual quotes about Trump:

"Trump is a fucking moron." - Rex Tillerson, Trump's first Secretary of State

1/6 "Trump is an idiot, unhinged."

John F. Kelly, Trump's second White House chief of staff

2/6

I realized, Elon not only fired the compliance people at Twitter who dealt with the sanctions violations I found in '22, he doesn't even know how sanctions work himself and built a system that signs contracts with SDNs for blue-checks

So X is a massive sanctions violator SDN designations are they are used today are broadly speaking derived from the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA

So, the IEEPA contains a specific exemption for cases like "what if Twitter gives Khameini an account"

This worked in '22

https://x.com/JoohnChoe/status/1745303290483798300

probably worth unpacking:

in '70 Mary Ainsworth at Johns Hopkins demonstrated four patterns of mother-child attachment when tested in the "strange situation" experiment where an infant is temporarily left alone with strangers

This is relevant to political behavior
1/10

https://twitter.com/AshaRangappa_/status/1829864971913871552

Attachment theory is useful both in decoding politicians and understanding voters because it

1) typifies people's reactions to their parents, which also shapes how they think about their romantic partners and their societies to an extent

2) it is unusually well-tested and valid

Let's try something different. There's 71 days until Nov 5.

I'm going to show you 71 beautiful things.

This is Delacroix "Liberty Leading the People", 1830.

Let me explain a couple things about why this painting is revolutionary.

1/ Today I showed close to a million people one of the ugliest paintings I've ever seen in my life, so this is probably a worthwhile exercise.

You might think because of Lena Rusleva that all Western political art is bad or propagandistic.

This is not true.

https://x.com/JoohnChoe/status/1827935431822114853

whenever someone says 'left can't meme' or 'MAGAs aren't weird', I think about this painting that a Trump supporter made and it's not, like, a @GaryPetersonUSA parody

That is a painting a MAGA made that they are proud of

want me to explain why this is bad?

let me explain:
(🧵) Here's Rogier van der Weyden at the tail end of the Northern Renaissance, this is 'Annunciation Triptych' ca 1434

It's showing the moment when an angel tells the Virgin Mary she's going to give birth to Jesus

We have an actual budget for @ResponsibleFP to run ads, now that we have t-shirt money coming in, so it's worth looking at @SenatorTester and Montana again. For transparency's sake let's do this publicly.

Buckle up, this gets into the weeds fast.

1/13 At a superficial level population density maps suggest six major population centers in Montana with a historical divide between eastern & western Montana.

I find Omaha, Nebraska fascinating lately.

Omaha has, effectively, one electoral college vote, because of the way that Nebraska apportions its electoral college votes; it's proportional, not all-or-nothing.

1/11



In April of this year, it looks like the Trump campaign tried, unsuccessfully, to change the way that Omaha allocates its EC delegates; their challenge failed, so Nebraska is doing what it always does, and Omaha ends up key again.

There are three parts of an argumentative act in Platonic theory:

- logos, its logical grist
- ethos, the manner in which it's delivered
- pathos, its emotional appeal component

Harris' primary task in her DNC speech was ethos: she had to show she can be Presidential.
(🧵) So the really interesting thing that's happening here is the "solution" that Harris finds to a frankly ferociously unenviable problem to me, portraying a 'plausible', believable President that you could vote for, while avoiding two very common tropes applied to female speakers.

Used to run a debate startup before I did this political thing for money. The reason why I switched was this advice I got that I'll share with you:

It's all about the community

This is sort of opaque without context so let me provide that -

(🧵) Back in December of '17 I knew a couple of things the rest of the world didn't know about the special election in Alabama for a U.S. Senate seat that had just happened.

In March of '18 the rest of the world found out one of them.
archive.is/SXaBD

The question is, where do we run @ResponsibleFP advertisements using the Make America Joyful Again cat (or just "joy cat") if we're looking to maximize our impact?

Start from paths to victory; there are three paths to victory to look at, two for Harris and one for Trump.

1/5 Path 1 is "blue wall states" plus one part of Nebraska.

Path 2 is, flip a Sun Belt state. If Harris loses one or even multiple Blue Wall states but carries a state like AZ, NC or Nevada (where Sen. Rosen (D, NV) is up by two-digit numbers in polls), she can win.

2/

It's interesting maybe even useful to go into why MAGAs are so obsessed with that one photo of a crowd in Michigan that they think is photoshopped or AI-generated.

In summary, it's because of the fundamental lie of MAGA's popularity that they have to keep up.

1/4 There are recurrent lies that entities like MAGA, Russia, or Boeing have to keep up - indeed, telling these lies is how they sustain themselves and survive, it's how they exploit the audiences they lie to.

These lies are repeated, basic violations of 'felicity conditions'

2/4

So on Twitter at least most of you probably know me from NAFO or the resistance, to a lesser extent, my research being in the Times or the Post.

One thing I also do is make memes; some you've probably seen, others not.

I track them too.

1/12





I made this.

This is the first post of this image on Facebook (and also proof that I created it):


and on Twitter

To borrow a meme phrase itself, what you're seeing right here is meme warfare.facebook.com/choejoohn/post…

https://x.com/JoohnChoe/status/1821743535952900313

A lot of people think this one by @helenstickler is AI-generated. It's not.

This is *ordinary* for the Harris campaign.

Something is happening, and whatever dumb new attack Trump & Vance come up with, history will remember this time as about her, not them. (1/2)

https://twitter.com/FeistyLibLady/status/1821253550686540287

That's not fake; the signs are two-sided, that's why they look like they face backwards. That's not AI

That's 15K people in Michigan.

Trump, by comparison, couldn't even fill a 10k person auditorium where Harris had people standing in the parking lot just to be a part of things

There doesn't seem to be a concise explanation of critical mass theory for digital movements so I'll just put it out there:

There's a point in social movements' growth where they really take off (or don't). That point is 'critical mass'.

A really easy example of this is #NAFO -

The actual first fella crafted was in May 2022, but outside of a limited community defined by a bunch of European people that I don't know from Adam (and I'll bet most of you didn't either) no one knew about it.

In late June 2022, NAFO membership rose sharply after this Tweet.

You know, I would vote for Republicans but wow they just don't scream shrilly enough

Yeah no that's what it is keep that up that'll get you your "big tent" party "they're trying to make Minnesota into California!"

California is a country unto itself, highly diverse and with the strongest economy and one of the best state health insurance systems in the country

I'm not seeing the issue here

a lot of interesting things are going on with how the riots in the U.K. started; it's disinfo and it's from Russia, that's interesting enough by itself

it's also interesting that this came from account compromise and a shift from innocuous content to incendiary political content

https://twitter.com/AlecLuhn/status/1820077747458187660

in April a bunch of people in disinfo research were wondering, like, what the hell is going on with all the generative AI crap on Facebook

Facebook has cut reach somewhat but it's still there

https://x.com/JoohnChoe/status/1779573201498145245

Revisit the Overton Window concept in light of the politics of the moment and it's maybe even illuminating

I think Republicans have gotten so far to the edges they can't speak to the middle anymore because of negative influence and the exclusionary dynamic of fascism

1/14 Republican primaries reward extreme-right candidates because hard-right Republican voters are the likeliest to turn out for primaries, which also usually have much lower turnout than general elections

The result has been an accelerating rightward drift